Tab Suspender Chrome Extension — Free, Set Your Timer

Most of the RAM a browser eats sits in tabs you are not looking at. Tab suspension is the SuperchargePerformance feature that clears that out on a timer you set, and the tab stays in your tab bar until you click it.

The tab suspender vs Chrome Memory Saver comparison covers the two side by side if you want the head-to-head.

What Tab Suspension Does

Tab Suspension ships in the SuperchargePerformance extension. A background timer tracks when you last used each tab. When a tab sits idle past the threshold, the extension discards it. The tab entry stays in your tab strip; the process behind it is released, which is where a tab’s memory lives.

The core feature is free. The PRO tier is a one-time payment rather than a subscription, and it adds a custom timer you can set in seconds.

Setup in Three Steps

1. Install SuperchargePerformance. Tab suspension is in the free core, so nothing else to add.
2. Pick your level: Low suspends tabs idle for 15 minutes; Medium does it after 5 minutes. The default is 5 minutes.
3. Use the Suspend All Inactive Tabs button in the panel to clear idle tabs immediately, instead of waiting for the timer. Sites you add to the whitelist are kept warm forever.

What It Controls

Beyond the timer, the feature has hard protection lists:

• Active, pinned and audio-playing tabs are never suspended.
• chrome://, edge://, chrome-extension://, file://, about:, data: and devtools:// pages are excluded.
• Web app domains (Figma, Notion, Slack, Discord, Google Meet, Spotify) are excluded by design, since they run persistent connections.
• Sites on your whitelist are fully bypassed.

Tabs that grow past 200 MB of RAM hit a fast path and are suspended sooner. The tracker covers up to 1000 tabs.

PRO adds three dials: a custom idle timer in seconds (60 s default), a memory threshold slider from 100 to 500 MB in 25 MB steps, and an idle window from 1 to 30 minutes. The popup’s RAM saved readout counts 80 MB per suspended tab, shown in GB. That is a conservative estimate, not a measurement. A discarded tab gives back 90-95% of the RAM it was holding.

How It Differs From Chrome’s Memory Saver

Chrome’s built-in Memory Saver steps in when RAM gets tight and discards tabs on its own schedule. You cannot set the inactivity window, and there is no button to clear idle tabs right now. That is the gap tab suspension fills: the threshold is yours, and the fast path catches RAM hogs before they pile up.

A suspended tab reloads when you click it, so a heavy page takes a moment to come back. Web apps are excluded, so a Slack or Discord tab keeps its memory.

Permissions, Privacy and Edge

SuperchargePerformance declares the storage, tabs, alarms, declarativeNetRequest and scripting permissions, plus host access to all URLs. Storage holds your level, timers and the whitelist. The rest is what the whole extension needs: the blocking rules, the inactivity timers, and the tab work itself.

The extension collects zero telemetry. Nothing about your tabs leaves your device. Uninstalling opens a feedback page on superchargebrowser.com; it carries no browsing data.

The same extension is listed natively on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons store, so tab suspension works on Edge as well.